George Symons, vice president of product marketing and management at Legato, says his company’s storage resource manager also enables business growth planning and optimal deployment of SANs and backup technologies. It can also be used to ensure the availability of critical applications.

GEMS SRM and SRM for Exchange work by automatically scanning the enterprise storage environment, collecting data points on capacity, consumption, availability, and configuration. This information, stored on a Microsoft SQL Server database, provides alerts, reports, policies, and historical data that help IT efficiently detect and solve application and storage-related problems.

Legato claims GEMS SRM differs from other management tools in two important respects. First, GEMS SRM can manage an entire network's storage resources, not just those of a specific server or application. Second, SRM manages more than a simple process, such as backup or archiving. It focuses on analyzing, configuring, and optimizing all storage processes and resources.

According to Legato, by simplifying the existing storage environment customers can more easily deploy storage area networks and network attached storage solutions. Further, as storage proliferates, so does the need to manage it.

According to market research firm Dataquest Inc. (www.dataquest.com), the market for storage resource management will reach $1.2 billion by 2002.

Paul Mason, vice president at IDC (www.idc.com), agrees that the storage resource market will be important in the next few years.

"With the continued proliferation of data on all platforms, and the critical need to keep it available around the clock, organizations are looking for solutions that give them an enterprisewide view of their storage environment and alert them to potential problems," Mason says.